The goal is a satisfyingly-immersed-in-life present - not finding
ways to sort of trick a kid into learning something.

Pam Sorooshian

AN EXAMPLE (by Jenny Cyphers):

If he loves to build, strewing might look like this:

...at the thrift store and you see some interesting foam blocks and purchase them because they look useful for building.

...at the park and you see some interesting rocks and sticks and you bring them to where your son is playing in the sand and help him incorporate them into a building design.

...online and you find an interesting and catchy youtube video that has some cool lego building project and you share it with your son.

...you are driving to the grocery store and you see a demolition in progress, so you pull over to watch. Or, similarly, a building in progress, or a great big hole in the ground, etc.

...you save cardboard boxes and pull them out in a time of restlessness and build a box fort with him.

That is just a start, a small start on strewing with building in mind.

I've heard of unschoolers who say they never bring home anything for
their kids—because they feel that puts subtle pressure on them to
learn what the parents are promoting. I say hogwash to that. I
pick up stuff ALL the time—STILL do it, and mine are 14, 18, and
almost 21. If I see an unusual fruit in the grocery store, I buy it
and take it home and put it on the table for others to notice. If a
kid is in the store with me I might say, "Oooh look at this. Let's
take it home and cut it open."

Pam Sorooshian

I personally have three wicker baskets that all fit on my coffee table
and I fill them with lots of interesting things; some things that the
kids just have out a lot so I figured it easier to just leave it out,
and some things that I just find interesting that I put in there and
am constantly changing things out and putting new things in. It is
amazing what sparks their interest! We are even taking those baskets
with us on our year long motorhome trip!

Heidi
(fivefreebirds)

Expansive Strewing

[Pam, to a mom who said her daughter chooses things to bring home, but the mom doesn't:] If YOU
know that she LOVED Candyland, then you might pick up Chutes and
Ladders because it is also likely to be fun for her - you don't need
to wait for her to ask for it. She might never happen to see it and
might very likely never realize that it is a game she'd like a lot.

[Sandra:] And if someone's interested in Chutes and Ladders, go online and look up Snakes and Ladders (and there are some online versions of it too), which is the traditional game from india on which Chutes and Ladders was based. It was a religious education tool for Hindu kids, and there are all kinds of gameboards. I collect them, and photos of them, and there were a couple on towels recently.

Let one thing lead to another for you. Explore. Not the mom pressing the kid to explore, but the mom exploring and connecting.

[Pam:] Or maybe she loves CLUE - she'd likely enjoy MASTERMIND - both
involve the same kind of logical thinking. So - how is she going to
know that?

[Sandra:] Neopets has two games that work like Mastermind, where one can not only explore that logic but also consider the computer programming that set those up. The games aren't completely random combinations--they begin with the first colors (one click) and progress to patterns with the later colors. That becomes part of the strategy of solving those particular puzzles.
Oh! Codebreakers is in the game graveyard (still playable, but not at the games link):

Public school teachers aren't always as prepared as we wish they'd be for teaching their subject matter, right? Shouldn't unschoolers try to be MORE prepared? A mom who's going to help a child learn from the whole wide world should herself become ever increasingly comfortable with what all is IN the whole wide world, and how she can help bring her child to the world and the world to her child.

Unschooling should and can be bigger and better than school.
If it's smaller and quieter than school, the mom should do more to make life sparkly.

[Dragonfly:]
[W]e'd love to describe some of the things you can do to make sure your son's homeschooled life even happier and richer than his school life. I'll start by describing something we (unschooling parents) all do. It's called "strewing" and it involves making a wonderful variety of resources available to your kids with no expectation or requirement that the resources ever be used. These can be books, toys, or supplies left casually on tables or in bathrooms or presented quietly or with fanfare directly to your child. They can be posters hung on walls, craft or music or gaming activities that *you* start, Web pages left open on the computer, magazines subscribed to, alternate driving routes taken, etc. It is SO fun to do, and it creates an environment of discovery and fun in your house. The things you strew can be in support of interests your son has expressed or about just any old thing you think of. In the recent past, I've strewn my daughters' paths by:

* Leaving http://www.WorldWideWords.org open on the computer to the page outlining the origins of the phrase "mind your p's and q's," which my daughter had asked about in passing one day. (She read it and then continued surfing the site.)
* Taking the whole family to a dirt-bike event. (Fun for all four of us.)
* Bringing home some bargain books on poetry and art, plus a history book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" -- that really grabbed everybody's attention! :-) (All three books have been flipped through, but it was my dh to read the history book cover to cover.)
* Bringing home a new XBox game, called Gotham Racing or something like that. (We've all played, girls laughed SO much together. XBox was on for at least a couple of hours every day for a week or so, now it's been off for days.)
* Leaving out a book I already own about building catapults. (No takers yet.)
* Inviting over a friend and her 12yo son whom my girls had never met before. (A very fun evening. One of the highlights was my friend's son completely un-self-consciously demonstrating a folk dance he'd learned.)

All this happened in and around all our usual activities. Actually, there's been nothing usual about our schedule these past few weeks, which goes to show how little time strewing can take! But never doubt that your usual activites can provide a lot of strewing, too. In our case, we've been making arrangements for my younger daughter's departure to England (lots of history and geography and tidbits gleaned), and I've been doing a lot of networking to arrange some get-togethers with local unschoolers because my older daughter wants to meet more people. And then there's work and going to watch my dh earn his first Iaido (Japanese swordsmanship) ranking and, oh yeah, HOURS of prep work for my younger daughter's 12th birthday party on Saturday — she wants to do about a dozen projects out of this wizard party book she found at the library. We're making candied rose petals today — a first for me in several ways, and yet another example of how they strew *my* path with interesting things. :-)

Unschooling really is a mutually rewarding lifestyle! My family has never been happier.

dragonfly (Ronnie Maier), to a skeptical newcomer on unschooling.info/forum March 2006

Manipulative?

There have been a couple of discussions in which people said strewing
was manipulative and sneaky. I don't see it that way at all. If I
know what kinds of things my children could use being exposed to to
be more well rounded, or to "fill in gaps" in what they know, or to
take them to another level of understanding, bringing those things up
in physical or conversational ways is no more "manipulative" than
bringing more fruit into the house if there hasn't been much fruit
consumption lately, or bringing them bottles of water on hot summer
days. I don't need to force them to eat oranges or drink water, but
I can notice it might be good for them and make it appealing. —Sandra Dodd

"What else is there to strew?"

A mom wrote about strewing books. I wrote and said strewing books wasn't the best way to strew. Below she quoted, me, asked a question, and I responded. (—Sandra)

-=-You said, "meant to say that strewing BOOKS is lame. If books are a small
part of strewing, great! If books are a large part or ALL of
strewing, no good whatsoever."

-=-What else is there to strew?-=-

Everything else.
Things that have caught people's interest here:

magnifying glass
prism
crystals for projecting rainbows
magnets
construction kids of various types
maps
scratch art paper
various papers, pens, stickers, glue, different things different times
games
science bits —floating pig mirage, anti-gravity tops (another magnet
trick)
sensitive plant
rocks
bugs
bird's nest
new foods
magazine articles about things they're already interested in
music
musicals
new jokes
interesting webpages
costume bits—hats, masks, funny gloves, feathers...
antique little things
imported this-or-that—carved boxes, printed cloth, fans, wood carvings
nerf toys—guns, rockets, balls
water toys, bubbles
games, puzzles
geoboards
"attribute blocks"—wooden shape tiles
foreign money
new bills to compare to old bills, $2 bill...
foreign stamps
trivia books (not quite trivia, but yesterday I left a little What
would Buddha Do? book in the bathroom—I saw it moved twice, and now
it's not there. Somone carried it out to read elsewhere—so that was
a book, but not a library book brought to the table, but a book I had
had for years, put in a new place to be discovered)
photos (ours from older days, or other people's of interesting
things, or published photos)

out of the house to zoo, museums, flea market, farmer's market,
live performances of dance/plays/music

My kids have been interested in books and documentaries, but if I
only "counted" that, or thought those were more valuable than the
other connections, unschooling would fizzle.

Yesterday Holly and I were watching the pilot episode of Lois &
Clark, The New Adventures of Superman. She was too little to have
seen the show when it came through originally, but she likes Dean
Cain a lot, and has lately started watching Desperate Housewives, so
the Teri Hatcher presence would be a draw. In one scene they're
working late and Clark Kent says he'll go out for Chinese food. They
show with a map that he flies to Shanghai and comes back with string-
bound bamboo steam baskets. Then they show them opening fortune
cookies. I turned to Holly to say something but she was already
saying "They wouldn't have fortune cookies in China." When she was
doing research for a girl scout presentation years back she learned
things about China none of the leaders knew—like that there WERE no
girl scouts in China, and the Chinese flag wasn't blue. (Yeah, not
the greatest of troops.) But she also learned that fortune cookies
are a U.S. invention, and she remembered. Will that ever be on an
SAT test? No, and she might never take an SAT test. But the writer
and director and actors on that show seem not to have known.

Everything counts, and every connection made increases the depth and
breadth of the map of the universe each person is building. It makes
it easier to learn the next few things, because there are more places
to hook the knowledge.

Sandra

Deb Lewis adds:

***out of the house to zoo, museums, flea market, farmer's market,
live performances of dance/plays/music***

...and funeral homes...

Dylan and I have been watching the HBO series Six Feet Under. We didn't
get HBO and never knew about the series when it was on but a friend
thought we might like it and loaned us her series on dvd.

I work at the local flower shop and we do A LOT of funeral flowers, talk
to the family, spend time listening to the stories and in that way, I
told Dylan, the flower shop is like the funeral home in Six Feet Under.

The other day I had deliveries to the funeral home and I stopped at the
house first and grabbed Dylan. The guy in the casket was a man we both
knew—not a friend, but a kind of famous character in the community who
liked to write opinionated, angry letters to the editor of the paper.
We had met him a couple of times at community meetings. He was blustery
and frightening.

There he was, in the casket, the funeral music playing, the empty chairs
waiting for mourners. We put the flowers in the right places. Dylan
asked if I had made the casket spray and how I had known what size to make
it and I told him we have casket spray stands that gauge the sizes for
adult or child caskets. I said I'd show him next time he was in the
shop and told him when I was younger and worked at a shop in Oregon we
used to push each other around on the wheeled spray stands when the
manager was gone. We looked around, looked at the dead guy. Dylan
recited one of the fake commercials about embalming fluid from the tv
series. The casket was *glorious* and I thought if I had one piece of
furniture that looked that beautiful or was worth that much money I'd
feel rich. And I hoped the casket wasn't the nicest thing he'd ever had.
I hoped it wasn't the nicest thing his mom ever did for him.

***out of the house to zoo, museums, , flea market, farmer's market,
live performances of dance/plays/music***

Our town is small and we've been to the museums here more than once but
we still find new things to do here. A new store opened so we checked it
out and talked to the owner. The radio station moved from the residence
of the owners to a building downtown and we took a tour. The mom-in-law
of my employer got a bunch of fancy chickens and we drove out to see
them. She showed Dylan a coffee table book about chickens. She showed
us her little sun room where she grows orchids.

There's always something to do, someone to talk to, some road leading
somewhere.